Conventional computing resources involve deployment of physical hardware at the user site for providing the computing and storage requirements of the user. Further, the deployed configuration must be sufficient to provide acceptable performance at peak demand times, which may be substantially greater than an average load. Therefore, a large user base such as a corporation, university or other enterprise was forced to invest substantially in sufficient on-site resources to handle peak demand, in addition to allowing for an expected demand growth to avoid rapid obsolescence.
Advances in network technology, fueled in no small part by the Internet and other public access networks, however, have brought about networking capabilities sufficient to remove the users from the physical hardware environment and exchange computing resource requests and services remotely via a networked connection. Such performance has resulted in so-called “software as a service” (SaaS), or “cloud computing,” in which users such as corporations invoke remote servers for computing resources as needed, and thus pay only for a current level of resources demand. This relieves the need for investment in “worst case” system sizing and allows deployment of additional computing resources only when actually needed.